This invention relates to a portable ice rink surface building and resurfacing device.
Due to the popularity of ice rinks based sport events such as competitive skating, hockey and curling, ice rink resurfacing equipment is well known in the art. The most popular ice rink resurfacing equipment is likely that sold under the trademark Zamboni, originally disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,642,679, and later improved and refined and described for example by U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,622,205, 4,705,320, 4,372,617, 4,356,584, 4,125,915, 4,084,763, and 4,069,540, all issued to Zamboni. The self-propelled Zamboni ice rink resurfacing machines and other similar machines such as those sold under the Olympia trademark and other machines disclosed by U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,133,139 and 2,795,870, are based on the principle of shaving the surface of the ice, scraping the ice surface to remove ice shavings accumulated from skating and reapplying a smooth and thin layer of water which fills skate grooves and crevices and freezes to provide a smooth ice surface.
These large machines usually are the size of an automobile, as exemplified by the first model of the Zamboni, which was built on the chassis of a military surplus jeep. Due to their initial high capital cost and their inability to create de novo an ice rink, these large machines are suitable for large indoor ice rinks in commercial and non-commercial sports centers only. They are not designed for use in resurfacing remote rinks, outdoor skating ponds and backyard ice surfaces which are common in cold climates. To satisfy this market segment of ice rink resurfacing devices, several portable and non-self propelled resurfacing machines have been proposed to resurface smaller indoor rinks, outdoor skating ponds, neighborhood parks and remote ice rinks.
One class of such devices comprises hand-held manual ice resurfacers, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,771,698 and CA 2,178,966. Although both devices have different shapes, they both have a long handle for applying drag or push actions in order to resurface the ice rink. More importantly, both rely on an external water supply through a water hose to complete the resurfacing job. This limitation severely restricts the use of the devices to places near a water tap. Furthermore, in severely cold weather such as often happens in Canada and northern United States, the water hose can easily freeze. Draining and lugging water hoses is very cumbersome and the hoses must also be stored in a heated environment to prevent freezing.
Another class of devices tries to reduce this water supply dependency by incorporating a water tank on board. Two examples are illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 6,138,387 and the Olympia Flood Cart advertised by Resurfice Corp. (www.resurfice.com). These designs, while alleviating the problems of external water dependency and water freezing at low temperature, do not solve the problems completely. That is, an external water source is still needed in proximity to the ice rink. Water can still freeze inside the water tank. The transporting of large quantities of water over a distance or over awkward terrain is a task particularly hard to do in hardy winter conditions. It is all the more frustrating if the water freezes at the destination before application. Moreover, the quality of an ice rink surface made using cold water is inferior compared to one made with warm water.